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An Israeli Order in the Middle East
A Chance to Defeat the Iranian Vision for the Region—and Improve on the
American Vision
Amos Yadlin and Avner Golov
December 17, 2024
Israeli military vehicles in the Golan Heights, December 2024
Israeli military vehicles in the Golan Heights, December 2024 Jamal Awad
/ Reuters

Amos Yadlin is Founder and President of MIND Israel. He is a retired
Major General in the Israeli Air Force and served as the head of
Israel’s Defense Intelligence from 2006 to 2010.

Avner Golov is Vice President of MIND Israel. From 2018 to 2023, he was
a Senior Director on Israel’s National Security Council.

    More by Amos Yadlin
    More by Avner Golov
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What is happening in the Middle East today is best understood as a
struggle over a new regional order. Since the Hamas attack on Israel on
October 7, 2023, three competing visions for that order have emerged and
then faltered: the Hamas vision, the Hezbollah-Iranian vision, and the
American vision. Hamas sought to ignite a multifront war aimed at
destroying Israel. Iran, along with its proxy Hezbollah, aimed for a war
of attrition that would cause Israel to collapse and push the United
States out of the region. The United States, which stood firmly behind
Israel, hoped for regional stability built on new political
possibilities for the Israelis and the Palestinians, normalization
between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and a defense pact between Washington
and Riyadh.

None of these visions, however, proved tractable: Hamas, Hezbollah, and
Iran misjudged the strength of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Israeli
society, and the U.S.-Israeli alliance. The United States overestimated
its capacity to influence Israel’s approach to the war in Gaza and did
not sufficiently contend with the regional threat posed by Iran.

The failure of these three visions creates an opening for a more
realistic fourth one: an Israeli vision. Over the past three months,
Israel has begun to exert its power to reshape the Middle East. It
eliminated Hamas’s military capabilities and—shattering its own
long-standing approach to deterrence—decapitated Hezbollah’s leadership
and compelled the Lebanon-based group to accept cease-fire terms it had
long resisted, leaving Hamas isolated and Iran without its most capable
proxy. Israel has also carried out sophisticated strikes inside Iran.
The opportunistic toppling of the Assad regime in Syria at the hands of
rebel forces can be understood, in part, as an attempt to take advantage
of Israel’s undermining of Iranian regional power. As a result, Iran has
lost the land corridor stretching from its borders to Israel’s, a
corridor that Iran had devoted significant resources to establishing
over the past four decades.

These developments mark a dramatic shift: for nearly a year after the
October 7 attack, Israel’s vision for the region’s future was unclear.
It was defending itself and, by extension, fighting to preserve a status
quo that would never be reestablished. Although its operations were
aggressive, Israel refrained from disrupting the existing deterrence
dynamics with Hezbollah and Iran. Moreover, it hesitated to impose a new
order while it was viewed as an instigator internationally and while
divisions weakened Israeli society domestically.
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Israel is now reshaping the Middle East through military operations, but
it would benefit from asserting itself politically, too. It has both the
opportunity and the responsibility to steer the region’s trajectory
toward a new, more peaceful and sustainable reality. Currently, Israel’s
ability to force regional changes militarily outpaces its readiness to
articulate and enact a cohesive strategic vision; its operational
successes do not, as yet, have clear strategic ideas to go along with
them. Israel should push for a political framework to match its
battlefield successes. An Arab-Israeli coalition backed by the United
States could repel threats from Shiite and Sunni radicals, provide the
Palestinians with a realistic political future, safeguard Israel’s
security interests, secure the return of the Israeli hostages still in
Gaza, and prevent another attack on Israeli soil.

Israel must not seek to impose its vision of a new regional order alone.
It needs buy-in from the United States, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and
the United Arab Emirates, as well as Germany and the United Kingdom,
even as U.S. foreign policy undergoes its own realignment under
President-elect Donald Trump. The situation is delicate. But for the
first time since the October 7 attack, Israel has the opportunity to
seize the moment.
BEST-LAID PLANS

When Yahya Sinwar, the late Hamas leader, ordered an invasion of Israel
on October 7, 2023, he did so with a calculated vision for the Middle
East: immediately after Hamas’s attack, he anticipated a coordinated
assault from all Iranian-backed militant groups in the region, which
would in turn inspire Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in the West Bank to
launch a new intifada. Sinwar’s plan relied on the participation of
Hezbollah and other members of the Iranian-backed “axis of resistance”
and even of Iran itself, ultimately leading to the complete military
defeat of Israel.

But Sinwar severely misjudged regional dynamics. On October 8, although
Hezbollah declared its support for Hamas and began shelling Israeli
towns, its actions were limited. Shiite militias from Iraq and Syria
launched rockets and drones to disrupt Israel’s advanced air defense
systems, but these efforts posed no significant threat to them. The
Houthis in Yemen joined the assault by targeting ships in the Red Sea
and launching missiles at Israeli cities. The Syrian dictator Bashar
al-Assad facilitated Iranian arms transfers to Lebanon but notably
stopped Iranian militias from attacking Israel from Syrian territory and
did not involve the Syrian army in the conflict, despite facing pressure
to do so from Iran. Hezbollah did not invade Israeli territory, focusing
instead on distracting the IDF in the north to divert its attention from
Gaza. Additionally, Sinwar’s hoped-for Palestinian uprising did not
materialize, in part because of the IDF’s rapid and effective deployment
to areas of the West Bank with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad
presences. Meanwhile, Israel applied intense force in Gaza, killing
thousands of Hamas fighters and, eventually, Sinwar himself.

Israel’s decision to engage in a prolonged war initially emboldened Iran
and Hezbollah. They saw the conflict as an opportunity to assert their
regional hegemony. Unlike Hamas, whose goal was Israel’s outright
destruction, Iran sought, more modestly, to improve its regional
standing. By sustaining a multifront war of attrition against Israel,
Tehran aimed to increase the pressure on Israeli society and amplify the
costs of the war. With the United States focused on its strategic
competition with China and the war in Ukraine, Iran anticipated that
Washington would further withdraw from the region.

    Sinwar severely misjudged regional dynamics.

The initial Israeli response to the Hezbollah-Iranian strategy appeared
cautious. Israel evacuated northern communities to create a security
buffer instead of invading Lebanon to directly counter Hezbollah’s
missile attacks, effectively allowing Hezbollah to continue its strikes.
Additionally, although the United States publicly backed Israel, Western
governments largely failed to impose significant costs on the
Iranian-backed axis of resistance. Their inability to stop the militant
Houthis in Yemen from interfering with Red Sea maritime traffic
emboldened the group to escalate its attacks on Israel. International
pressure constrained Israel’s ability to decisively defeat Hamas and
fueled Sinwar’s hope that Israel would not be able to sustain the
fighting for long. These factors combined to create the perception among
Iran and its allies that Israel might eventually find itself isolated,
economically drained, and exhausted. This idea was reinforced when, in
April, Iran launched an unprecedented missile and drone attack directly
from its own territory against Israel. Iranian leaders celebrated
Israel’s measured response—and the ongoing political turmoil inside
Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government pursued policies
that prolonged the war, strained the economy, and intensified
polarization, giving the upper hand to Israel’s enemies.

Meanwhile, the United States continued its pursuit of a Middle East
strategy built on the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations
between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. After
October 7, Washington pressed Saudi Arabia to finalize a defense pact
tied to normalization with Israel and reasserted its belief in a
two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Biden
administration sought to leverage the war to create a stronger
pro-American coalition in the Middle East, shoring up Washington’s
influence and creating a more integrated regional economic hub linking
Europe and the Indo-Pacific in its competition with China.

But the U.S. plan failed to adequately address the threat from an
emboldened Iran or assuage the concerns of the United States’ junior
partners. Saudi Arabia declined to normalize ties with Israel as the war
in Gaza persisted, particularly as Israel refused to commit to a
two-state solution—a move that would be interpreted by Israel’s enemies
in the region as a victory for Hamas. Netanyahu, for his part, chose to
delay ending the war’s intense phase, waiting instead for the outcome of
the U.S. presidential election in the hope of a Republican victory.
Trump’s election, he believed, would lessen U.S. oversight over its
campaign against Hamas. With the Democrats’ loss in November, the United
States’ strategy in the Middle East has been thrown into doubt. Despite
all of Washington’s power and leverage, the American vision for a new
regional order, reasonable though it may have seemed, has proved
similarly infeasible to those of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
EMPTY THRONE?

In September, the prevailing winds in the Middle East began to shift.
After 11 months in which the Israeli government set no objectives in the
northern theater, the Israeli cabinet added the safe return of Israel’s
northern residents to their homes as a formal war objective. The war had
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